Nonlinear, Low-Energy-Actuator-Prioritizing Control Allocation for Winged eVTOL UAVs

Winged eVTOL aircraft’s ability to generate aerodynamic lift with wings and to create upward thrust with upward-facing rotors makes these vehicles capable of the kind of versatile flight needed in urban environments. Because of these vehicles’ aerodynamic complexities and their unique methods of producing thrusts and torques, control allocation is needed to determine how to distribute force and torque efforts across the aircraft’s actuators. However, current control allocation methods fail to properly represent the actuators’ complex dynamics and are unable to harness the full potential of these over-actuated vehicles. Current shortcomings include modeling rotors as linear effectors while the wide range of airspeeds experienced by eVTOL aircraft leads to significant nonlinearities in the thrust and torque achieved by each rotor. This means linear control allocation methods may consistently fail to produce desired thrusts and torques, which can inhibit the vehicle from tracking a trajectory at best, and at worst can cause the vehicle to stall and lose control. Additionally, current control allocation methods are often unable to prioritize low-energy actuators resulting in shorter battery life. We present a nonlinear control allocation method that considers a nonlinear rotor model, allows for prioritization of low-energy control surfaces over rotors, and reliably accounts for actuator saturation. Simulation results show a 90% reduction in high-airspeed trajectory tracking position error from a typical, linear least-squares pseudoinverse control allocation method while maintaining comparable energy use.